Story A Day

Last week I called a number of concrete contractors to schedule estimate visits for this week.  As we approach selection of a contractor for our garage we are also getting bids for the concrete driveway we will need to get IN the garage, as well as a few other concrete projects.  I would have never guessed when scheduling those estimates that I would spend Monday afternoon tromping through 4 inch snow pointing out the locations for the contractors to measure!  Yowsers.  Where did spring go?  Returning soon…I hope

I was reveling today in the absence of snow in our yard, just a few small piles left, only to hear on the news tonight that we could get 3-7 inches tomorrow! Noooooooooo!!!! I am sincerely hoping that the meteorologists are wrong this time!

After a night off for a Friday date night Tim and I got back to work on the basement today! We spent a good chunk of the morning at our second home (aka Menards ) picking out paint colors, scoping out the sale on doors and adding all sorts of necessary odds and ends to the basket. We rocked out to Cities 97 and inhaled lots of nasty fumes for the remainder of the afternoon as we primed the walls. Boy am I glad we have a couple full size windows to open down there! A few degrees warmer outside would have been nice for the energy efficiency nut in me Two rooms are now primed. The bathroom, laundry room and challenging stairway remain to be primed tomorrow. And then, on to the real paint colors! Woo-hoo! It’s really looking like real rooms now.

My sister posted a comment on my previous blog wanting to know where the awaited sheetrock photos were Here you go! Progress in the basement! They come back tomorrow to sand and then I get to prime and paint! Anyone want to join me this weekend?

I played around some more with the 3D landscaping software today. I developed a draft landscaping plan for our whole yard It was fun. It will likely occur in a number of phases but it’s exciting to have the beginning of a plan so that we can talk about options and it’s not so piecemeal. The software is so cool, you can actually walk through the yard to see how everything looks, or fly over the house like a helicopter! Fun. Here are a couple of the draft plans…

FRONT OF THE HOUSE

VIEW OF THE GARAGE FROM THE HOUSE

As spring approaches Tim and I are starting to think about a new landscape plan in the midst of our 3 missing trees. I remembered that I bought a 3D landscape design CD a while back from the bargain bin at Best Buy. I had lots of fun with that tonight It’s too bad there isn’t some magic money tree to foot the bill for all of the grand designs I came up with!

The drywall crew came today and in less than 4 hours had all of the sheetrock up in the basement!  I am glad we decided to hire for this portion They are fast!  The mudding crew comes tomorrow.  I’ll post some photos once the mudding and taping is finished.  It feels like a whole new space!  Real rooms!  Very exciting

Tim and I made the trek to Long Prairie and back today for the annual family Easter gathering.  We don’t mind the fairly scenic drive (if you enjoy looking at farms, trees, and the horizon – which I do), though on the way home it was longer than usual.  It took us over 3 hours to get home as a result of a mysterious traffic jam.  It was about 8:30 pm and the jam started a couple miles northwest of Monticello (you MN people will know what this means).  We were alternating between a dead stop and 5 miles per hour for a good 20-30 minutes.  Here’s the weird thing, not too far after Monticello the interstate ADDS a lane, going from 2 to 3, and there are no obvious “bottleneck potential” spots in between.  We thought for sure it had to be an accident.  Nope. No evidence of any “incident” and the traffic cleared quite suddenly about 5 miles later.  We’re stumped.  This has occurred once or twice before and we were equally stumped.  Any traffic experts out there want to explain this odd phenomena?

Tim and I were finishing up the electrical wiring in the basement today in preparation for drywall on Monday.  Tim tied the last wires into the main breaker and we were testing all of the outlets just to be sure they worked.  The two outlets in the future bathroom did not work!  Ahhhhhhh!!! No!!!!!!  This was especially bad since that particular circuit has a wire than runs through the framed walls of two rooms, was already surrounded by insulation and was covered with plastic.  Not good.  Not good at all.  We could not figure out what might be wrong.  Tim went back to the main breaker and wiggled the circuit breaker a little (after turning off the power, of course!) and he noticed it did not seem as tight as the others.  Upon pulling it out it became obvious that the apparent “open slot” was not actually an open slot, and in fact, did not have the metal clip necessary to conduct the electricity to that circuit.  Hmmmmmm…..  Odd……  All we can figure is that the slot was meant to be available for the install of larger circuit breakers in the slot above.  Luckily, Tim left the wire long enough so that we could move it to another real open slot further down.  He wired it up, flipped on the power, and…..YAY!  The outlets worked.  PHEW!!!! 

For all of you out-of-town blog readers I thought I’d give you a glimpse of the world from my front door just after “the first official day of spring” I am hopeful that the inches of snow that fell today will melt quickly and greening will begin!  One interesting phenological observation from today – there were about 10 robins hanging around my yard this evening!  Very exciting…spring is coming soon!